Page 31 of Grant’s Blaze

“Picked you up where?”

Fortunately, I didn’t put money down on the estimate. That was three seconds on anyone’s clock.

“Fill me in on what you’ve been up to.” Please take the bait. Please take the bait. Please take the bait. “Seriously, what made you go see Elijah?”

“Grant.” She just stared at me, confirming the bait might as well have been a pile of two-week-old garbage, before huffing at my purposefully blank look. “I’m crazy, not stupid. I know what you’re trying to do. And it’s not going to work.”

I dragged a hand through my hair. Well, fuck. If she’d only kept talking about us in that cute little croak. If only her indictment didn’t make me instantly defensive.

“I’m not trying to do anything,” I bit out. “Why are you getting so confrontational?”

Rio reared back. “Confrontational? Okay, you remember it’s me you’re conversing with right now, yes?”

“I just want to talk about something else other than everything I’ve just been through.” I bellowed it and already hated myself for it. Didn’t stop me from pushing on. “It was hell, okay? And it’s not worth dredging my brain through it again. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”

I inhaled deeply through my nose, rubbed the back of my neck, then tilted my face to the skylight.

Can somebody give me strength?

Silence stretched across the room. I wasn’t picking up more tension from Rio, but that didn’t tick down the stuff she was already carrying. I wasn’t about to buck the odds on a premature détente.

“Picked. You. Up. Where?”

I growled. Okay, maybe I’d bucked. Just a little. Clearly too much. Christ’s sake, this woman could be like a dog with a bone. I’d already explained I didn’t want to burden her with the bullshit details of my experience. Why wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t that be enough? Apparently, even losing my temper wouldn’t get her to break her stride, though.

Instead, she stood there and continued to glare at me. The little hellion had gloriously great glaring skills. When the expression started edging toward a glower, I debated tossing her over my shoulder, stomping back to the bedroom, and fucking every last ounce of sass from her perfect body and warp-drive mind. Maybe then we’d have a sliver of hope of getting one good night’s sleep under our belts before starting back on dealing with both our nightmares.

With every passing second, I liked that idea more and more. So maybe a version of the truth was the way to go. It would keep her at bay but not freak her out. Damn good plan—except I could do with some more time to work on the details of said plan. Which parts were worth telling her? Which got held back? Some were obvious, but others were necessary for the whole thing to be believable.

“He picked me up in Catalina. In a helicopter. Well, he didn’t personally, of course.” I rolled my eyes dramatically and then inwardly winced. That was probably one step too far, and I probably just blew my scam with one mistimed eyeball movement.

“Of course,” Rio mocked.

Yeah, blew it for sure.

“But yeah, Catalina,” I offered again and then waited to see if she’d push for more.

“So how did you get there from the boat that those monsters transferred you to? Clearly it wasn’t some grand schooner or anything. I mean, not that I saw the whole thing. But not that I didn’t try. It was so dark that night. But I could hear it. A lot of it. A lot of everything.”

She waved dismissively, like that wasn’t the important point of the conversation.

I was inwardly glad because her rambling was confusing the hell out of me. But maybe that was a blessing in disguise too. Obviously she’d mentally replayed the details of my abduction a million times—a connection that had me feeling like the world’s greatest dick again. Hell came in a lot of different forms. The one she’d just been through was different from mine, but shitty all the same—as evidenced by the questions she was machine gunning at me.

And she deserves answers, asshole.

“But I’m still just not getting the logistics,” she went on, waving her hand around again, which brought me a moment’s worth of a grin. This habit of hers was truly adorable. I appreciated that more now. “I mean, it was days until we got to Marina del Rey from where that…incident…occurred. So for you to get all the way to Catalina… Did they take you to a larger boat after that, or what?”

As quickly as it had come, my mirth wilted. Bile rose in my throat the moment I allowed even one splinter of a memory to get under my skin. And now, with every new question, Rio was driving the traumatizing shard deeper.

Thankfully, she noticed something deeper was happening here. I was grateful when she reached up to place a tender hand on my stubble-roughened cheek. All traces of her aggression from just minutes before were gone.

“You know what?” she soothed. “Never mind. Or at least, you tell me when you’re ready. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you’re not ready, and I just keep pushing anyway. That’s not fair to you, and I’m sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say other than the obvious. “Thank you,” I said with gravel-covered emotion, turning my head to place a reverent kiss on her palm. I kept my gaze locked with hers, which brought my system to an entirely new dilemma.

The way my cock stared to twitch again.

The pressure was instant but insistent, a defined reminder of how I wanted to spend the last part of this day. At the same moment, my system absorbed the oatmeal like it’d been three energy shots and a speedball. I was ready to conquer the world.